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Liberation bibliography: Towards open access to powerful knowledges to enhance forced migration advocacy

 Sally Baker / John Tran / Louise Olliff / Karen Block / Charlene Edwards /

The new Australian Research on Refugee Integration Database (ARRID) clearly demonstrates that there has been a proliferation of research on issues relating to forced migration over the last 10 years. This research translates into a large and rich body of scholarship, mostly published by academics in academic journals that are hidden behind paywalls. According to Lawson and colleagues (2015, 3), these are features of academic publishing “that help to define what commodities are, have been organised to provide a privileged and stratified access to this scholarly information and knowledge.” The competitive logics that characterise contemporary neoliberal higher education thus create an individualistic and metrics-driven approach to sharing knowledge, with academics uncomfortably complicit in the commodification of knowledge.

When it comes to research with a social justice mission, such as the complex and layered field of forced migration/refugee studies, this commodification is extremely problematic. It creates the highly unethical situation where many of the people who are participants, co-researchers or potential beneficiaries of the research are unable to gain access to the knowledge written about them.

In addition to the moral failure of making public/ publicly-funded knowledge inaccessible, in the sense that it is often funded by universities as public institutions, the commodification of information also means that the insights and learnings gleaned from forced migration research do not translate well or easily into (often much-needed) shifts in policy and practice. Our advocacy is therefore stymied if the research that is conducted is not publicly available.

The Refugee Education Special Interest Group (RESIG) has sought to redress these inequitable informational barriers by creating a version of what Barbara Fister (2010) calls ‘liberation bibliography’, which she argues “arises out of outrage at the injustice of the current system”. We have developed a series of resources, including ARRID and an open access annotated bibliography, which are created from a desire to signal solidarity, to bridge academic and ‘ordinary’ worlds, and to create a public good. In fact, we are in part creating what Lawson (2019) describes as a commons-based open access approach through the curation and promotion of collectively-created public resources. In doing so, we are actively seeking to resist and disrupt the persistent hegemony of neoliberal ideology in not only higher education, but in related sectors, such as schooling, settlement services, employment and community spaces.

We will end with the words of Fister (2010, 89), who so eloquently articulates the mission of liberation bibliography as taking “seriously the slogan, so often inscribed on academic buildings of a certain age, that the truth shall set us free—and that means freedom should extend to all of us, not just to a select class of employed academics and currently enrolled tuition-paying students”.

 

References

Fister, B. (2010). Liberating Knowledge: A Librarian’s Manifesto for Change, Thought & Action, 83–90.

Lawson (2019) Open Access Policy in the UK: From Neoliberalism to the Commons. Unpublished thesis. Birkbeck, University of London

Lawson, S, Sanders, K, Smith, L. (2015). Commodification of the Information Profession: A Critique of Higher Education Under Neoliberalism, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 3(1):eP1182.

About Author/s

Sally Baker

Dr Sally Baker is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and the education ‘focal point’ for the Forced Migration Research Network at The University of New South Wales. Sally’s teaching and research interests centre on language, literacies, transition and equity in higher education, particularly with regard to culturally and linguistically diverse students, and refugee students in particular.

John Tran

John Tran works within the higher education sector as a practitioner and advocate for social and equitable education outcomes and has an education background in Data Science. His main work has been in helping students from refugee and asylum seeker background gain access to education as well as transition through University into careers and is currently employed at University of Technology Sydney as a Student Equity Project Officer. In his capacity as an education advocate of Refugee and Asylum Seeker students, he is the website manager for refugee-education.org and is a current steering committee member of Refugee Education Special Interest Group (RESIG).

Louise Olliff

Dr Louise Olliff works as a Senior Policy Advisor for the Refugee Council of Australia, a consultant for the Asia Pacific Network of Refugees and as a sessional academic. Louise has worked for NGOs in various research, policy and advocacy roles in Australia, Cambodia and Ghana since 2001. Her PhD in Anthropology and Development Studies (University of Melbourne) explored how refugee diaspora organisations mobilise to help in forced displacement situations and the implications of diaspora humanitarianism for the international refugee regime.

Karen Block

Dr Karen Block is Associate Director of the Child and Community Wellbeing Program, Centre for Health Equity, in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. She is also the Academic Lead of the Melbourne Social Equity Institute’s research program, Migration and Social Cohesion and Academic Convenor of the associated Interdisciplinary PhD program in Migration, Statelessness and Refugee Studies. Dr Block has a strong national profile in the area of migration studies, exploring the interplay between host communities and migrants and the complex ways in which this interaction affects health inequalities, integration, inclusion and social cohesion.

Charlene Edwards

Charlene is the Executive Officer of the Melbourne Social Equity Institute, where her role is to facilitate and support interdisciplinary and community-engaged research across a broad range of social equity issues. She is the co-creator and Director of the Institute’s highly successful Community Fellows Program, which supports small to medium sized community organisations to undertake research of importance to their organisation and the people they serve. She has a particular interest in creating programmatic pathways to support people with lived experiences of marginalisation to meaningfully participate in research.

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